Mexico’s JUAN RULFO (Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno, 1917–86) is remembered mostly for his modernist, minimalist 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, a spare, uncanny fusion of ghosts, nostalgia, memory, and Mexican history; and for El llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames), a 1933 collection of stories set in the impoverished state of Jalisco, a harsh badlands that existentially taxes (and suffuses) the souls of those who live and die there. Gabriel García Márquez credited Rulfo’s writings for having jolted him out of a writing block, thus making Cien años de soledad possible; and in his 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature lecture J.M.G. Le Clézio praised not only Rulfo’s writing but the “simple and tragic photographs he took of rural Mexico.” For Rulfo was also a photographer, who — like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams — visualized terrain and people in a way that memorialized them in an instant. He turned routine shots of the everyday into monuments, semiotic talismans that immortalize a Mexico that no longer exists for a world with a bad memory (and a sometimes worse image) of our complex neighbor to the south. We ought to remember Rulfo for his vision of Mexico in this medium too.

About the Author

William Nericcio runs the Cultural Studies MA program (MALAS) at San Diego State University. His book Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America (2007) has become a traveling show, MEXTASY. William also publishes the Textmex Galleryblog, and he is working on a new book for UT Press titled Eyegiene.